


his name is a wooden ship

by bellerophonii



Category: Newsies - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, BIG OL TW FOR DROWNING AT THE END OF THE FIRST CHAPTER, M/M, Other, graphic descriptions of drowning, more tags as i write this probably
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-07 01:20:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12222831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellerophonii/pseuds/bellerophonii
Summary: David Jacobs moves to the pleasant small town of Green River, Maine, and gets drawn into a game of political manipulation, lying through your teeth, and falling in love with dark haired boys who kiss too rough.-A Jack/Davey Barbie: A Mermaid Tale AU. What it says on the tin.





	1. all roads lead to Maine

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Sabrina Benaim's spoken word poem "Unrequited Love: A Play in Nine Acts." It's very good. This fic is a purple prose hellscape but I enjoyed writing it, please let me get to the second chapter before I real life am forced to die in a cage match to the death because I wrote this.

David Jacobs is a smart kid. A capital-S capital-K Smart Kid, which is a subtlety only known to those Smart Kids and the kids whose parents wish they were Smart Kids instead of just smart kids.

All his life his teachers have favored him for being polite and quiet, told him to choose a STEM field, and that he was going to do great things in his future. In New York City, anything is possible, and everything David could ever want in life could be his. His life would be in order in a neat filing cabinet, he’d have a wife and two kids and a medium-priced minivan and a home in the suburbs, and when he died he’d have a small funeral with only his family attending and flowers sprayed with enough pesticide to kill a horse. All he had to do was be a capital-S capital-K Smart Kid and everything was going to work out.

Funny how life works sometimes.

He taps his fingers across the railing, like an invisible piano sits atop it. He learned to play the piano as a kid because it was a smart thing to do. Helps the brain, or something like that. The ocean before him stretches out farther than he can imagine, but the section of beach he owns now from his inheritance is relatively small. A wooden pier interrupts the completely empty swath of sand, fine and smooth from where he stands. He’s on the balcony of the imposingly immense house sitting on a cliff above the beach. The shadow of it looms over the beach. The cliff rises high above sea level. He imagines himself falling, then, and falling forever until he hit the sand and then it would all be over and he could be home again in his dreams.

His hands still.

Even from the cliff the house precariously sits on the edge of, he can see the seagulls pecking at bread and seaweed. They look like little plastic toys he could pick up and move around. The ocean seems to glitter, just a little. He wishes idly he would wake up, and realize it really had been a dream and he could go back to living in New York City. Living the 9-to-5 lifestyle may have been awful, but at least he wasn’t in the middle of nowhere in Maine. This town wasn’t even close enough to anywhere to be considered a tourist trap.

A beach house is a hell of a step up from a studio apartment with a roommate, though, and he couldn’t just say no when his mom asked him to move here. Of course, he’ll move to nowhere to his recently deceased uncle’s house just so it doesn’t get demolished.

David is a good son and a Smart Kid, he thinks bitterly. David does what other people tell him to. David smiles and quietly pays more of the rent than he should when his roommate doesn't pitch in. David’s fine, he’s not disappointed with the course of his life at all and it’s totally cool that he writes for an advice column for middle aged mothers and also has never gone on a good second date in his life, ever. He’s two years out of college and already feels like his life has stalled.

He immediately feels guilty.

It still feels like a dream. He should be waking up at any moment, and for the first time in a long, long time he’d be glad to get up and go to work and avoid his roommate.

When he first walked up to the house not an hour ago, it looked bruised, somehow. He thinks about the wooden walls warped by water, the tide coming in impossibly high and washing away the house and everything in it. He imagines letting himself sink, sinking to the bottom of the ocean floor and just waiting to wake up for the rest of his life.

It was a long ride here. He spent most of it with his forehead pressed to the train window, watching the trees fly past.

He just wants to get this all over with, and regretfully turns away from the ocean to step back into the hallway. The furniture is ornate enough that David can tell it’s expensive, the wooden floorboards are a rusty red-brown color, and the marble counter-tops in the kitchen are subtle signs of a very nicely-kept house. It’s clear, though, by the wallpaper peeling off the walls and the creak every single step makes that no one has really lived in here for a while. It smells like sweet corn from the garden out back, but the scent carries a bite to it unmistakably of salt.

The portrait above the soaring window in the central room is the only truly remarkable thing in the house, of only for how much it clashes with the rest of the house. It objectively, when David looks away and thinks about each feature of the woman in the portrait, is normal. When he looks straight into her impassive eyes, though, they are a dark, tea colored amber and send a shiver down his spine. Her hair is a rich interplay of dark, copper red and a wood-like brown. He foregoes looking at the portrait most of the time, and instead passes the parlor into the narrow hallway the staircase to the attic is tucked up into.

David sneezes several times in quick succession.

There is a lot of dust, to perhaps underestimate the cleaning job he’ll have to do.

He sighs, and gets to work.  
-  
He’s pretty sure he’s dying. It’s all over. His organs were failing, his eyes burn, and he’s really, really tired of cardboard boxes. The amount of dust he’s inhaled and subsequently hacked up along with the rest of his lungs is astronomical. A gallon of lung dust.  
David glances at the large, circular window that allowed a swath of light into the attic. It faced away from the main town, probably why David’s great-whatever hadn’t bothered to put up a curtain. It was a clear, unrestrained view of the wide ocean and should have felt freeing, but to David it felt more like he was in a hamster cage, kind of like in Finding Nemo where the fish are in the dentist’s office and the little girl is looking at the fish and-

Is he the fish? Is the ocean the dentist? His metaphor is falling apart and he realizes he’s been staring at the last cardboard box for the past five minutes. Thank god, because he’s so tired of wading through old photographs and family memorabilia. He can’t even identify which parts of the junk mean something, and what is just glorified garbage. He should feel guilty, he thinks, that he knows so little about his family. But his mom never said much about her childhood and neither had his dad. Live in the present, Davey, his mom would say whenever he asked, and wouldn’t elaborate.

He uses the box cutter he found in a kitchen cabinet to slice open the top, setting it aside. A lot of tissue paper greets him. Festive.  
He tosses the paper to the side, growing more and more annoyed the more he finds. Amazingly enough, he’s found the world’s first ever infinite supply of tissue paper, an excellent resource for the millions of people out in the world who crave more tissue paper.  
Finally, he unearths a necklace at the bottom, nestled in a dull red velvet fabric. Nothing else is in the box.

David shakes the necklace experimentally. It looks like sand, kind of, settling in the blue and green water that mimics the rolling of the ocean outside his door. He’s not sure why anyone would keep it. It doesn’t seem like it’s made of gold, or anything. The chain seems pretty ordinary too, but his gaze keeps coming back to the stone. It seems heavier than it should be, like the necklace contains a weight, or something that pulls the gravity around it closer.

He lets the pendant rest in the palm of his hand, and brushes it lightly with a thumb to sweep off any remaining dust.

It starts to heat up in response.

He drops it, hissing and pressing his hand to his chest. He steps back from the necklace.

“What?"

The pendant explodes in a plume of smoke. He flinches. He’s hit by a strong salty smell, and a brush of wind that caresses his face before dissipating with the rest of the smoke.

The pendant crackles to life. A rough, water-damaged noise accompanies this, like the other cassette tapes that were stored in the boxes upstairs. A woman’s - no, a girl’s, really, she sounds astoundingly young - voice rings out, piercing the dead air of the house. “Whoever is out there to hear this message,” her voice whispers. The recording breaks occasionally, cutting out snippets of words. “I am the one of the first to revolt. The people here have been held under the power of those who try to take everything from us. Our families have been imprisoned for merely speaking up against our King. Please. Whoever will hear this message will be the only one who can help us. You want a destiny? You want a path, a future? Help us keep our kingdom safe.”

David processes this information numbly.

“Come to the sea, and you will find your war.”

The recording cuts abruptly, and David is left sprawled on the floor staring blankly at the necklace. He doesn’t want this destiny. He doesn’t want to let someone out there suffer forever. He needs to find out the truth. He doesn't know anything.

He pushes himself off the floor, using the wall for support. “What does come to the sea even mean?” he mutters, and gives the necklace one more glance before putting it in the back of his mind.  
-  
Green River, Maine is the truest form of American small town culture that exists on Earth. The purest distillation possibly existing naturally, that it seems ripped straight out of a terrible, gas station postcard. That is Davey’s theory, after seven strangers stop him on the street and excitedly question as to his place in the town, and seeing several loud, enthusiastic conversations occur as he walks along the street. Everyone knows someone who owns a store, whether it be general store or clothing shop, and somehow unexplained is the Starbucks still in business.

David stares up at the cheery sign proudly declaring the tiny building as the Green River Souvenir Shop, subtitle owned by the Jacobs family for decades. The wooden patio stretches all the way around the building, and two rocking chairs sit empty by the windows. A checkers table sits in disarray. He holds the scrap of paper his mom wrote directions to the shop on. He apparently missed the memo about the tourist monopoly his family held.

He pushes open the door, setting off a gentle clink from the homemade wind chimes hanging from the ceiling. The store is cluttered with postcards with the ocean and the slogan of the town on them.

“Hello?” he calls out. He wanders in further towards the back. It seems empty, the cashier at the counter absent.

A woman slams open the door behind the counter.

David jumps, a little.

She sets down the cardboard box obscuring her face, before turning her attention to him. She’s about his age. Her brown-blonde hair is drawn into a ponytail, and the green t-shirt she wears proudly declares her as a lifeguard of the Lake Morgan Summer Camp. She wears a lanyard around her neck, with a key-card hanging from it. When she waves him over, he notices the mini stacks of elastic and braided cord bands that hang from her wrists.

“Hello,” she says brightly, as she continues tearing the tape on the cardboard box. “Welcome to Green River! If you’re visiting the area, make sure to check out our souvenir section, we have some really great gifts if you’d like some-”

“I’m not really visiting, I, uh, just moved in?” David interrupts her, self-consciously.

“Oh! You must be David.” Her eyes widen. Her customer service voice drops completely. She abandons the box, shaking off the dust on her hands. “I’m Sarah, my family runs this store. I’ve never met any of my cousins before you. Do you need anything? We’d be happy to help you out with the move-in process, I know it can be pretty rough.”

He feels a little overwhelmed. She’s amazingly positive, like sunlight is radiating out of her.

“Oh, it’s okay, I don’t really have a ton of stuff,” he tells her. “Do you need any help with that?” He gestures vaguely towards the box.

She smiles at him. “Oh, it’s fine. What brings you to Green River?”

She breaks it open finally, a cloud of dust billowing out. She turns the box over, a pile of travel guides for Maine spilling out onto the counter. The cheery orange covers are a neon glare within the softly lit store.

“I moved here to clear out some stuff for my uncle, into the house on the beach down the road?” he says.

“Oh wow, that house’s been empty for a while. Guess you must be his nephew or something? Making you my… what, twice removed cousin?” She stacks the books into neat piles, then pauses. She leans in close, giving him a conspiratorial grin. “Did your parents tell you about the legend?”

He blinks at her. “Sorry?”

“Now, just between you and me, I don’t really believe in it. The whole town still does for superstitious reasons. But there’s a legend surrounding the little beach you have found yourself in possession of.” Sarah talks animatedly, gesticulating with her hands. She’s interested in the topic, even if she doesn’t believe it. “The guy who owned the house generations ago supposedly met a mermaid in the ocean while he was out swimming, and she took him to the kingdom far underneath the place we could survive. Water pressure, and all that. She changed him into a merman and showed him the beauty of the land, and then told him that there was a war that was going to begin soon, and the kingdom would crumble. She gave him a necklace to call others to their cause, and he promised he would come back and help them.

“Problem was that he never came back.”

“He just took it and left?” David asks incredulously. He feels a little outraged at his hypothetical ancestor who hypothetically met mermaids.

“Yep, real asshole, huh?” she confirms. “Anyway, the mermaid had fallen in love with the man even though he was a massive dick, and when he never came back she died of heartbreak.”

“That’s it? He just leaves and the kingdom just plunges into chaos?”

“Yup,” she says, returning to sorting the travel guides. “Again, probably isn’t real, but it’s a little bit nice and a little bit sad. Supposedly the kingdom got destroyed and that’s why no one can find it, but if you ask me, it never existed at all. Cool story, though.”

He thanks her for the story, mind drifting already. She waves him off with four postcards of the Maine coastline, and invites him to write to his parents later.

After he speaks with Sarah, he tries not to think about it. He goes to the beach with Sarah and her little brother Les when they invite him, he meets the rest of his family in a brief conversation, he emails his columns to his boss, and he cleans the house completely. When it’s free of all dust and dirt, he does it again. And again, and again, every day the same no matter what. Nothing ever changes because he doesn’t want it to.

He’s sitting on the pier with Sarah on a Tuesday, after the last flickers of the sun disappear under the horizon. The sky still carries the pastel colors of the sunset, a gentle reminder that the sun was there, at some point, and will return the next day. It’s clear, only the clouds dusting it like dried paint. The tide is low.

“So what do you do?” Sarah asks. “You know what I do already.”

“Oh, I - ” He’s not- he’s not embarrassed, but he wishes it was more interesting. “I write in an advice column for a local newspaper. I majored in biochemistry, and that didn't turn up many career leads, so I went back and got a second degree in journalism.” He wishes it was something like Sarah’s, drenched in the history of her family and neck deep in the love she has for her town.

“I think that’s pretty cool,” she says, and he can tell she means it.

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“What do you mean, so?”

“Are you happy with it?”

He has to, at some point. He has to ask her if he’s hallucinating the mermaids or not. He’s convinced himself and unconvinced himself that they were real several times. He can’t pay attention to any conversations, he drifts off while he’s walking and ends up a mile away from where he meant to go, he calls his mom and gives her the blandest responses to her questions. He feels guilty after he hangs up, but what else can he do?

“I don’t know. I want to write about something important, at least. Something big I can be a part of, not… advice columns.” he says. He shrugs, trying to brush it off. Sarah pulls her hair to one side, and twists to face David. She looks him in the eyes.

“I’m gonna go to space someday,” Sarah confides in him.

“Really? When?”

“I don’t know,” she says, and tips her head back with her eyes closed. She has a smile on her face, gentle and ambitious in one. He notices her ears are pierced, little sailboats hanging from them. “But I’ll be there. I love my family and I love Maine, but I don’t want to be a lifeguard forever, y’know? I wanna go to space, and be an astronaut, and look at Earth from Mars and wave hello to my mom and my brother.”

David picks at the splinters in the pier. He feels trapped suddenly, a panic washing over him as he stares resolutely into the water. His own personal time loop. The exact same day, nothing changing, always marching into some unforeseen future with his eyes shut. All his life he’s taken it all in stride and waits for it all to finally fall apart.

He has a suspicion it’s coming.

“You look like you’re thinking about something.” Sarah says curiously.

“It’s fine,” he says automatically.

“Okay,” she says, and doesn’t make him talk.

He keeps seeing scales washing ashore. They go to the beach. He keeps having fitful dreams of a storm brewing. They wade in the water and Sarah laughs as she teaches David to swim and David says something sarcastic he barely hears. He sees hands grabbing his wrists in his nightmares and dragging him down into the sea and when he hits the bottom, he sees sand and that’s it.  
She convinces him to walk the four miles down the winding highway to a cliff. He agrees, even just to keep his mind off of the message. The cars whizz past as they trek along the highway barrier, and Davey avoids looking down at the intimidating drop off. A car edges just a little too close for comfort occasionally, but neither of them say they should turn back.

He’s sweaty and feels gross by the time they hit the edge, while Sarah is still radiant as usual. The tide pulls back as he steps up to the edge, and he crests the wave as the cliff spills out from under him. Sarah watches him as he stares. The cliff drops off in a heart-shattering slope, plummeting into a ocean so deep and blue it looks like it holds a storm. The Pacific Ocean is calm and beautiful, and he is in awe of every inch of it.

She stays there with him, not talking.

David walks her home, after. They stop at her front stoop.

“I have a date with her tomorrow and I’m telling you all about it as soon as I leave.” Sarah tells him excitedly.

“Good luck,” he says, awkwardly. He’s happy for her, but his last date ended with him in the other guy’s apartment uncomfortably calling a taxi in last night’s jeans. Good god, he needs to get his act together and settle down, like his dad keeps asking him to do.  
She squeezes his hand. He hadn’t realized they’d been linked for the last mile. It’s like he’s watching himself talk to her and make jokes and laugh. A stranger in his own life, and a stranger in a new town with one person he talks to.

“Thank you,” he says.

“See you tomorrow, David,” Sarah says, and hugs him tightly and reassuringly.

He takes the long way home. He unlocks his door. He pauses.

The ocean is undisturbed, except for the definite flash of a tail near the pier. Not out of the corner of his eye, not an illusion, just the moon reflecting off the mercreature he definitely saw. He’s been wearing the necklace since Sarah told him about it, terrified to step too far into the water but terrified someone could steal it.

He lets the keys fall out of his hands. The sharp clink of them falling disturbs a bird nesting in the eaves. He toes his shoes off at the place where the grass starts to fade into the beach. The sand is still warmed from the sun.

He wades out into the water until the cold lessens and he’s submerged up to his chest. The air is cold. The ocean is calm, only a slight breeze disturbing the flat plane of the deep, murky blue water. It reflects his own distorted, worried face back at him. He takes the necklace from around his neck, winding the chain around his right hand.

“Cool,” he says, feeling ridiculous. He’s acutely aware of the fact that he’s still in his now very drenched clothes, and standing in the ocean at night looking for mermaids.

He waits there a moment more.

Something brushes his leg. He flinches, looking around. A cloud of sand surrounds him, kicked up from the ocean floor.

Not a hallucination, then. Just not the type he expected. He’s going to die because he saw a shark and thought it was a mermaid. He very determinedly does not think about the Jaws theme.

He feels another touch, and stumbles back.

A hand grabs his shoulder, and plunges him into the water. He chokes, nose and mouth filling with saltwater as he flails around. He forces his eyes open, ignoring the burning sting of salt. A woman has a grip on his shoulder. Her long, brown hair frames her face like a halo. Gills flutter at the sides of her neck, tipped with a gold tint. The light of the moon illuminates her from behind as she drags him further and further into the depths of the ocean. She yells something at him incomprehensibly. His brain is slowing down, every second happening slower than before.

As he sinks, he struggles against her as he tries to pry her off him. He’s losing his breath quickly. Her tail flicks behind her, iridescent red. Should probably also panicking about that, too, but his vision is blurring and a blackness creeps up on him.  
She grabs the necklace in his hand, jerking him towards her and snapping the chain. He cries out with his last breath. She seizes his wrist, and brings one hand up and smashes the stone against his palm.

He watches the pieces shatter and dissolve into his skin. Barely a drop of blood runs down his wrist before it heals quickly with the sting of salt. Instead of pain, he sees rather than feels his legs shift into a deep blue fish tail. Her voice comes into sharp, piercing clarity. Pain flares in his ears, echoes reflecting in his throbbing brain.

“The Jacobs guy?” she demands, pulling his hand. “You’re his son? His grandson? You’re related to him, right?”

“Holy fuck,” he says, wide eyed. “Are- why- there is no way I’m actually talking to a mermaid right now. This is a dream! Hallucination. I’m going to wake up any moment now.”

Her determined look softens into confusion.

“What, the legends? Oh, they’re true. And since you’re the successor to my- the destiny of Samuel Jacobs, you’re stuck here until we take down the King.”

He gapes at her.

“Listen, I’ll explain everything to you, but we have to go. We’re running out of time and the execution is approaching fast.”

“Execution- Whose execution? What is going on?”

She swims away from him, and he follows helplessly. He’s stuck here until she explains what is going on. She’s going fast enough he has to work to catch up. They go deeper, but the pressure that should be collapsing his lungs doesn’t come.

They stop abruptly at an end to the ocean floor. It drops off, into a trench so wide he can’t see the other side. On the bottom of the valley, is the kingdom.

It doesn’t spill out before him, because it is clearly placed in a deliberate, powerful way. The spires of golden and pristine white towers raise themselves up to the surface. The buildings of marble are heavy and imposing, and he sees movement in a town square in the center. Like a coffee machine filling a cup, motion brews and threatens to overflow. Dissent is stirring like a plague.

There are two sectors, cleanly divided. An inner circle, comprised of the white buildings that first caught his eyes, and the outer layer that dissolves the farther away from the core it goes. It’s filled with industrial complexes and fire escapes, and the run-down landscapes that are the polar opposites of the richer center. It is quiet there. Silence shuts the doors and noise does not reach David whether it was there or not.

She turns back to him, fixing him in place with a sharp look. She is serious and desperate, and David is scared of that combination.

“My name is Katherine Plumber. Jack Kelly is going to be executed soon, and you’re going to help me get him free.”

Shit.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, this one is real short but I wanted to get something out. I hope it provides some good exposition and character work, because I'm really excited for the climax of this fic. There were some minor edits to the last chapter, not major but ones that might play a role in the ending. Thank you sm for reading!

Katherine’s eyes are dark, like strong tea and amber-brown with a certain kind of tiredness that was difficult to place unless you had really looked at her for a good, long minute.

When she has him pressed into an alleyway with her hand covering his mouth, there isn’t much else to do but look. So massive it seems like it could crush him, a sea squid with deep, jagged scars along its back swims slowly along the streets. A trail of cloudy blood follows the creature as its tentacles cling to every available surface, pausing before moving on. Everyone’s curtains are drawn shut and the doors closed off.

She muffles him with her palm, keeping an eye out and nudging him further into the alley.

“Curfew,” she whisper-explains. “Patrols. Doesn’t like it when it looks like people’re plotting something.”

She moves with him further in, until she finds a notch in the brick wall by running her hands over it experimentally. She tugs, somehow, and a hidden door hisses open, almost silent but not quite.

She pulls him in, and then the door is shut and the outside world is gone.

The dimly lit hallway is cramped, stacks of twine-tied newspapers taking up most of the room. Bare light-bulbs cast a yellow glow onto Katherine’s face. Doors are scattered along the hallway, until it splits into two routes and each divide further into the building. It looks like someone had dug the guts out of a factory or industrial complex, and thrown in everything they could.

Katherine leads him down the hallway until she stops at a door marked with a red handkerchief tied around the doorknob. She tugs open the door with some difficulty.

The room, still small and underlit, is as clean as possible. Bandages and various medical supplies are stacked in neat rows on the counters, and the walls are painted an off-white color that reminds him of school nurse’s offices.

Two guys, both younger than David, are sitting cross legged on two wooden stools in the corner. The blond guy has his elbow propped up on a side table, and another violently ginger guy is wrapping his upper arm in gauze bandages that are already spotting with blood. The blond one is absently chewing on the end of a cigar, which David can’t imagine actually tastes good. He has a face that could be described as blameless, except for a scar that crosses his forehead and cheek.

The blond guy looks up at Katherine when she closes the door after him, and he makes eye contact with David and turns suspicious.

“Who’s this?”

Katherine points at David. “Davey,” she points at the blond guy. “Race. There we go. Have you seen Crutchie?”

“It’s David, actually, but I don’t know what’s going on, either,” he tells Race, who raises his eyebrow at Katherine.

“Kath, where did you kidnap this poor kid from? Hell? Christ, you look scarred.”

David frowns self-consciously. He doesn’t look that bad.

“He’s the kid in the prophecy,” Katherine says, and the ginger guy groans.

“That again? Are you sure it’s even true? I like a little magic in my life just as much as the next guy, but this is pushing it.” he complains. He accidentally twists the gauze tighter.

“Ow,” Race lightly slaps him on the arm. “Are you trying to kill me?”

Katherine rolls her eyes, and takes David’s arm and drags him into the next hallway. “That’s Albert, he says a lot of shit but he’s in it just as much as the rest of us.”

“Sorry, could someone please explain to me what ‘it’ is? Because I just got dragged from the surface into-” His last words come out muffled as she slaps a hand over his mouth.

“People around here aren’t really trusting of outsiders,” she hisses. “Just… don’t mention the human thing. Avoid talking about it.”

He takes her hand off his mouth. “Okay, so, why am I here? What prophecy?”

“The king of this place, Pulitzer, has been pushing people like us out of the kingdom for months. He makes it clear that he hates us, and I intend to make it clear that a king who doesn't stand for his people is no king at all.”

“So you’re trying to bring the king down?”

“We’re trying to eliminate the ruling class altogether,” Katherine says heatedly. “The problem is that this is not just one king. This is a problem in the institutional structure of the kingdom.”

David does his best to vaguely remember his AP Government class in high school.

“I’m not trying to, uh, discourage you or anything, but what does that have to do with me?”

“The prophecy,” she says immediately. “There’s this rumour that a heir to the throne is going to be able to bond properly with one of the things we need to take down the kingdom.”

“A rumour? This is based on a rumour?”

“I know it sounds vague and unhelpful, but I promise that once we get the full prophecy it’ll all make sense. We need to rescue our leader first, though. Pulitzer’s got him locked up for defying him.”

“Jack?” David guesses. Her expression changes subtly into something more upset.

“Exactly.”

“And if I help you,” David says. “You can change me, uh, back?”

“Yes,” she says immediately. “All you have to do is uphold your side of the deal.”

David thinks this might be entrapment, or exploitation, somehow. She looks at him nervously, but her posture betrays nothing.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

She sags with relief.

“Thank you. You can just… be here. I’ll figure everything out, I promise.” The implication that David was not invited to the planning stage did not need to be spoken. She leaves through a different door, and David leans against the wall and slides down until he’s sitting down.

Once things calm down a little, David hears it. There is a low thrum in the back of his chest, a steady beat to counteract the heavy panic of his heart. The ocean is always there. The sound of the waves hitting the rocks and sweeping through and past the valley. Oceana, Katherine called it when they had been coming here, Not that you’ll be here for long.

Just here to help her, and then he’s done and he can go home.

He loses track of time somewhere along the way, staring at the ceiling until his eyes burn. He gets up, and goes to find Katherine.

It seems like he wanders through the same rooms in a circle until he opens a door and there's an alleyway outside. The low hum of voices is heard through it, and when he opens it he hears Katherine and someone else. He presses himself against the barely open door, listening closely. Is he supposed to be eavesdropping?

A mention of his name prevents him from closing the door.

“Davey,” the other voice says, male and young-ish. “He’s the heir to the kingdom? He’s supposed to bond with the fish god thing?”

“Crutchie, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I need you to trust me,” Katherine says. “This is the only way we’re going to…. fix it.”

A long silence.

“Katherine,” he says. “I want him to be alive just as much as you do, but-”

“Don’t, please,” she says wearily.

“Fine.”

She doesn't know if he’s alive or not. They could be going on a suicide mission to find some guy David doesn't even know, and he thinks he’s about to panic because his breath is coming short and sudden. He closes the door as silently as he can. By the time Katherine and Crutchie come through, David is gone.  
-  
The sole window is in an empty room, with only a few crates stacked in the corner. The window has chicken wire and iron bars crossing it, casting an ominous shadow onto the cement floor.

David finds a book, lodged in one of the crates. East of Eden, which he’s read before for a school assignment, but it’s been so long that as he flips through he barely recognizes it. The light of the setting sun is just bright enough that he can make out the words. He flips through worn pages, until he reaches an inscription all the way on the back cover. Katherine P. is written in child-like handwriting in the top right corner.

A knock. He looks up. Katherine lingers in the doorway, and she waves. David and moves over to let her sit next to him.

“So,” she says after she perches on the edge of the bed. “The meeting.”

“The meeting,” he agrees.

“We decided we’re going to send just you and me. Me, because I know the layout and stuff, and you, because you need to hear the prophecy.”

“How do you know the layout?” he asks curiously.

She bites her lip, then releases a deep breath with a sigh. “Inside information. Don’t stress about it. We just go in, find Jack and set him free, and then we’re done. He’ll be able to fix this. He can help us.”

“Is he really as great as you say he is? There’s no way anyone can live up to those kind of expectations,” he says, and he means it to be a joke but it falls flat.

“No,” she says, “He’s good. He’s a good person. He tries.”

“Oh. Do you - are you in love with him?”

“We’re together,” she says. “We’ve been together for a while. I love him.”

“I’m glad you’re happy,” he says honestly. “I think you deserve to be happy.”

“You barely know me. But - yeah. He makes me happy. He makes me glad I knew him.”

He promises himself, as he looks at Kath, that one day he’s going to get his perfect, uncracked love like her. Not the same kind of one-night stands he’s been waiting through his entire life, not the kind of love where it requires effort and hurt, just easy and sweet and perfect.

The first great love of David’s life started and ended in a carnival ride.

He was twenty, and he is twenty in this memory and he is in college and he is bright, and still happy, and still alight with an excitement for the future and for living. A classmate in his biochemistry class has formed a study group with him, and when everyone else ditches except for them, his classmate asks him to go to the fair with him.

David today would have said no, he had seen the future and decided he did not want it and so had closed his eyes and pretended it was not there.

David yesterday says yes.

It is five minutes into the first rollercoaster, pressed into a boy with dark hair and mischievous eyes’ side, that David feels the boy’s hand link with his, and thus begins three years of the infinity of a moment passed by. Now it is in the past, David sits at a park bench outside a neighborhood carnival and asks the boy why, and the boy can only shrug and say, “Long distance relationships are difficult.” It seems the second where the boy thinks David will nod, and smile, and say goodbye for good stretches out for miles. But then it is over, and the boy nods, and smiles, and walks away down the pavement.

David has always thought, at some level, he would only ever get that one great love. He wasted his chance, probably, on a twenty-year-old boy with a double major in biochemistry and historical poetry.

He wants something more, but he doesn’t have a clue how or where to find it. He barely knows what he’s looking for.

“Tomorrow,” she says eventually. “We’ll do it tomorrow and then we’ll be fine. I promise. Get some sleep, alright?”

When Katherine leaves, he stays sitting in the dark room until the light fades into a blue-tinted dusk. When he holds his wrist up to the night, the veins in his arm stand out like a glowing beacon in the dark.

Two blue, one purple, like the old trick that your children would have a boy for every blue, and a girl for every purple vein. Of course - wildly untrue, and his ninth grade biology teacher would have a stroke immediately if anyone told her that in 100% honesty, but.

It’s nice, sometimes, to believe in legends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on tumblr @ bellerophonii! Please comment if you liked this so far, or if you like the premise so far!

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, please comment and kudos! I'm on tumblr dot com @ bellerophonii, and on Discord as twinkdavey#5121.


End file.
